Woodland Healthcare is poised to expand a niche business to meet growing demand from patients nobody else in the region is stepping up to serve.

The community health system, an affiliate of San Francisco-based Dignity Health, has filed plans with state regulators to add 10 more beds to the psychiatric unit at Woodland Memorial Hospital next spring. Expansion will cost $1.4 million, bring the number of psych beds to 30 and add 15 to 20 new jobs.

Woodland Memorial is the only hospital in the Sacramento region — and in a wide swatch of territory north to the Oregon border — that provides acute care to patients with complex medical and mental health conditions. The hospital, which currently turns away 1,500 patients a year, will consider a bigger fix if others are willing to help.

“Who knows where this might lead,” said Kevin Vaziri, president at Woodland Healthcare, an integrated health system that includes the hospital and the Woodland Clinic Medical Group, which has offices in Woodland and Davis. “Could we someday build a tower that goes farther in meeting the need? It would take huge support from a broad region.”

Short of that goal, Woodland Healthcare plans to expand its reach by offering emergency room evaluations via telehealth in hopes that some patients will get the treatment they need without a hospital stay.

Specialty programs like the one in Woodland are able to care for patients’ acute medical needs, such as intravenous feeding or medication, oxygen and dressing changes, in addition to mental-health treatment.

Without this care, patients in crisis go to the emergency room for medical help or a psychiatric facility for mental-health services. Either way, one component of their care is shortchanged.

Most patients end up at the emergency room, where staff is unprepared to care for them. Some are stuck there for days. Others stay for weeks, compounding a mental-health crisis in the Sacramento area where dozens of psychiatric patients line hallways, waiting for placement.

Other hospitals steer clear from this kind of care because it’s pricey and requires expertise. If patients are covered by government programs or lack insurance, treatment is a big money-loser. Private insurance is better, but less common.

Psychiatric hospitals in the region, including Sutter Center for Psychiatry, Sierra Vista Hospital and Heritage Oaks Hospital, focus on mental-health needs, not acute medical care. They all provide limited medical care but are full most of the time and have their own niche.

“Woodland has been the med-psych anchor for us during the crisis,” said Scott Seamons, regional vice president for the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California. At 20 beds, the unit is relatively small, so expansion is sorely needed, he added.

“It’s one of the centers of excellence for the hospital, but it may not be the revenue source they’d like,” Seamons said. “The mission at Dignity Health — to take a deep breath and say ‘Let’s continue this’ — is laudable.”

Woodland Memorial has contracts with 15 Northern California counties to provide inpatient med-psych care. The hospital is located in Yolo County, which sets the contract rate and gets first priority. Medicare is the worst payor of all, with rates far below the cost of care.

The business, if done efficiently, saves hospitals money elsewhere — most importantly, on expensive waits in the emergency room where these patients don’t belong. Locally, Woodland gets referrals from other hospitals affiliated with Dignity Health, as well as from Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, Marshall Medical Center and the UC Davis Health System.

“Providing specialized inpatient psychiatric services for individuals who are medically compromised is key work,” said John Boyd, administrative officer at Sutter Center for Psychiatry. “We have a very close relationship with Woodland Memorial and collaborate frequently.”

The hospital also is looking at expanding its psychiatric services by telehealth. Woodland already has robots that can be moved around the hospital to provide videoconferencing with hospital emergency rooms far away. An agreement with a psychiatric telehealth company to provide the manpower behind these kinds of evaluations is in the works.